Honore de Balzac Quotes
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To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.
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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
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Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
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Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
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Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
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It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
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In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.
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The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
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Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.